John Harvey
Ash Bone
A book in the Frank Elder series, 2005
For Graham
Good friend and sound adviser for more than twenty years
Don't come round reminding me again How brittle bone is
Billy Bragg: 'Valentine's Day is Over'
By your late thirties the ground has begun to grow hard.
It grows harder and harder until the day that it admits you.
Thomas McGuane: Nobody's Angel
The first girl dead, there wasn't any choice.
Her friend – her sister, or was that all part of the pretence? – standing in the corner of the room, naked, one arm across her breasts.
Wanting to know what she'd seen but knowing. Reading it in her eyes. The thin stream of urine that ran down her leg.
'Oh, Christ!' he'd said.
Then someone: 'I'll take care of it'.
And when he looked again she wasn't there. Neither of them were there.
1
Maddy Birch would never see thirty again. Nor forty either. Stepping back from the mirror, she scowled at the wrinkles that were beginning to show at the edges of her mouth and the corners of her eyes; the grey infiltrating her otherwise dark brown, almost chestnut hair. Next birthday she would be forty-four. Forty-four and a detective sergeant attached to S07, Serious and Organised Crime. A few hundred in the bank and a mortgaged flat in the part of Upper Holloway that north London estate agents got away with calling Highgate Borders. Not a lot to show for half a lifetime on the force. Wrinkles aside.
Slipping a scarlet band from her pocket, she pulled her hair sharply back and twisted the band into place. Taking a step away, she glanced quickly down at her boots and the front of her jeans, secured the Velcro straps of her bulletproof vest, gave the pony-tail a final tug and walked back into the main room.